Someone was asking me the other day where I got my business cards from. They’re from a UK company called ‘Moo‘. That’s a picture of two cards above, in Sprite. Don’t ask…

I love the cards – they’re different (half the height of ‘regular’ business cards) and they’re not too expensive either. You can have your own pictures printed onto them (e.g. direct from flickr), and you can print as many different pictures as you want in a set (the one in the above pic is this one). Head over to the Minicards section at the Moo website for more info on them. They also deliver to international destinations.

So now more about the photo. I didn’t want to just take a picture of the cards themselves, so decided to sacrifice two of them (it actually landed up being a few more… oops) and put them in a glass of Sprite. To keep them in place, the card edges were gently pushed into the curve of the glass to ‘wedge’ them in place with a chopstick and a fondue fork. Then wait for a while for suitable bubbles to form (I learned a lot about bubble-forming – like when you first put something in there, it’s covered in tiny bubbles, but to get the more interesting ones, wait a little bit and they’ll start joining up or floating which gives a better random pattern with different size bubbles. I digress…). Then brushed away the bubbles from around the fish’s eyes and took the photo.

Actually one other thing that I used properly for the first time was Live View. It was the first ‘real’ time that I’ve used it, and it worked perfectly. I wanted the eye of the fish to be perfectly in focus, so using live view, and zooming into the eye then using manual focus worked perfectly.

Canon EOS-1D Mark III
1/250 sec at f/8.0
ISO 200
50mm

Strobist info: Large umbrella directly above the glass, pointing down with a 580 EXII at 1/4 power. There was a second 580EXII at 1/32 power to the left of the glass and slightly above the height of the glass, which gave the the distorted ‘flame’ of light (if that’s what you’d call it) to the right of the glass.

The picture is pretty much straight out of the camera, with the exception of some cloning to get rid of my phone number on the card, and also adding the vignette.